Cloud Foundry v2, sometimes known as “next-gen” or ng, is a big set of updates. I wrote about some of them in my last blog post, and also noted there that we are going to run the new version on AWS.

Some of the things worth getting excited about are:

• custom domains (the number one thing I’ve been asked for after every talk!)
• buildpacks – the ability to use “any” language, framework or runtime that has a buildpack, not just Java, Ruby, or node.js (Matt and Brian seem to be competing to find interesting ones!). By the way, you should totally be trying your Spring and Groovy apps on v2!
• organisations and spaces – the ability to share apps with a team and collaborate
• a web management console for your apps
• a Marketplace, which we will be expanding over time, allowing you to bind third-party services in to your applications.

These are all big changes, and there are many more under the hood (Warden, a new staging process, a new router… it’s a very long list).

My colleague Nima posted a nice slide deck giving a more technical overview of some of the internal changes:

In addition, our demo ninja Dekel has shared a great video of some of the things you can expect from version 2:

Over the past 24 hours or so I’ve been doing my best to respond to questions on Twitter and elsewhere. The existing v1 version will go away on June 30th, so if you are using it now you’ll want to look at migrating apps in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll share more on that soon. The new version will have pricing attached, with a free trial period too. Of course, the code is always available on Github and you’re free to spin up your own CF instance running on AWS, OpenStack or vSphere.

I know folks will have many more questions about the specifics over the next week or so, and we will be looking out for them.

Supercharging the community

As we have grown closer to v2 release, there has been ever-increasing activity in the vcap-dev mailing list and around the community. We’ve had more and more code contributions (so much so that I recently wrote a blog post about how you can contribute to the CF core projects). Projects like the cf-vagrant-installer and cf-nise-installer are helping people get local environments running very quickly. Our friends from PistonCloud released their turtles project. Best of all, the super Dr Nic Williams recently set up a cloudfoundry-community organisation on Github to act as an umbrella for many of these community contributions (info on how to join is here).

Let’s talk! (in London)

Over the past year or so I’ve spent a lot of time out in the developer community in London, and it has become apparent that a lot of folks are interested, already contributing to the community, or in some cases, already running their own CF instances in production

So, I thought it would be a good idea to do some bridge building and bring folks together to get to know one another. A brief unscientific Twitter poll suggested that other people liked the idea, so we’ve stuck a stake in the ground (evening of July 3rd) and I set up an Eventbrite page for a meet up. If you’d like to chat with people about Cloud Foundry over a drink, do sign up and come along. I’ll sort out a venue in the next couple of weeks, but I imagine it will be “around Shoreditch” or possibly over towards Waterloo, for purely selfish reasons! Totally informal, this is just a community meet up, so I’m not planning to do slides and talks and stuff – just come and share ideas or ask questions!

Related articles

• Cloud Foundry has gone Pivotal – so what’s new? (andypiper.co.uk)
• Clojure on Cloud Foundry (nofluffjuststuff.com)
• Want to Contribute to Cloud Foundry? Come on in! (cloudfoundry.com)

I am Pivotal

What does that mean for me, and for my role on the Cloud Foundry team? What is happening with Cloud Foundry right now? What about the Cloud Foundry community?

Well, as my über-boss James Watters recently wrote – we are a central part of the Pivotal business.

Our mission is to become the most popular platform for new applications and the services used to build them across public and private clouds.

That’s a pretty compelling mission statement, and I’d personally even add that we want to be the “best” platform, as much as “most popular”. One of the main reasons I wanted to spend a couple of weeks at the Pivotal office in San Francisco was really to immerse myself in the team and in the culture of Pivotal Labs, as well as to be at the launch event, and to get a strong handle on what is happening with Cloud Foundry, version 2…

Wait, what? Version 2?

In the middle of last year, the Cloud Foundry team started some major work to improve many of the features offered by the platform. Back then, it was written about on the Cloud Foundry blog. We initially started to refer to “ng” components like the Cloud Controller (“cc-ng”), and that’s what we now mean when we refer to “v2″. At the start of the year we published a roadmap which laid out a lot more detail in terms of what is coming. There’s some really great stuff in there – many bugs squashed; a new, high performance router; support for developers to collaborate on apps, via concepts of organisations and spaces; new containerisation via Warden; custom domains (yes, finally!); and most importantly, support for buildpacks. Buildpacks will bring a major change to our platform, replacing the former concepts of runtimes and frameworks (say, Java with Spring) with the ability to drop in whatever runtime or container you may choose, instantly making the platform more customisable. We’re pleased that the folks over at Heroku have allowed us to inherit the buildpack concept and having played with the new platform, I believe this gives us a really cool and solid way to support apps.

Deploying Cloud Foundry v2 on Amazon

While I was in San Francisco, I used BOSH to deploy my own new Cloud Foundry v2 instance to Amazon EC2 (and also attended the AWS Summit, which was a bonus!). Right now the team is working on migrating our  hosted cloudfoundry.com platform to EC2, and when we officially boot up v2 for the public, it will be running right there. This is not new news – both James, and our CEO Paul Maritz, have repeatedly spoken about AWS.  The point of Cloud Foundry has always been that it is a platform that is Infrastructure-as-a-Service agnostic, even when it was started by VMware, and I’m seeing increasing interest from folks want to run it on OpenStack, AWS, and other infrastructures as well as vSphere (by the way, did you read about how Comic Relief 2013 ran on Cloud Foundry on vSphere and AWS? so cool!). There is no lock-in here – write once, deploy to cloudfoundry.com, to a partner running a compatible Cloud Foundry-based instance, or to your own private cloud on your on infrastructure, as you wish. The Open Source nature of the project is exactly why I jumped on board with the team a little over a year ago.

Talking of the update to cloudfoundry.com: it is also worth mentioning that when the beta period comes to a close we will have pricing plans, a nice web console for user, organisation and application management, and the start of a marketplace for partners to plug-in their own services for developers. I can’t give more details in this post, watch the official channels for news!

I felt very strongly that I wanted to write about version 2. It is a very big step in evolving the Cloud Foundry architecture, and I believe that it is important for the broader  community to understand that it is a significant change. If you are running an app on cloudfoundry.com today, we’ll shortly contact you with information about migration to the new platform, as some changes will be needed to adapt to the fact that runtimes and frameworks are now buildpacks, there will be some changes to the way services work, and you will need our new ‘cf’ gem to deploy to the new service. We have already “paused” new signups on the current platform. If you look at the new documentation, you will find that it now focuses on version 2 – we apologise for any confusion during the transition process.

We’ve been talking with ecosystem partners about version 2 as well. For instance, our friends at Tier 3 recently blogged about Iron Foundry plans, and I had the pleasure of meeting with Stackato folks in person in San Francisco recently. If you are working with your own Cloud Foundry instance privately (we know that many organisations are!) I strongly urge you to talk to us via the vcap-dev mailing list to learn how you can start to take advantage of what the new platform brings.

What else does Pivotal mean for Cloud Foundry? Well – we are more open than ever, and keen to work with the community on pull requests to add features via Github. I’ve just written a  post for the Cloud Foundry blog about how to participate in the Open Source project. In fact, I’ll be talking more about this at the Cloud East conference in Cambridge next Friday May 24. We’re always happy to talk more about how to collaborate.

These are exciting times!

Related articles

• Want to Contribute to Cloud Foundry? Come on in! (cloudfoundry.com)
• Go Pivotal! (andypiper.co.uk)
• UK Charity Raises Record Donations Powered by Cloud Foundry (cloudfoundry.com)

As a techie and long-time disparager of Microsoft technology, the Xbox 360 was the MS product which turned my head. I won mine in a competition (having been a PlayStation and Nintendo gamer), and from the very first experience I was impressed – it was easy to get up-and-running, get online and pull in my social contacts from Facebook, and it was generally a smooth and impressive device. Since then I’ve also gotten to know some of the folks at Microsoft who are focussed on working with the Open Source community, and my opinions have distinctly softened and changed.

I’ve played with both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 on display in stores, so when the nice folks at Nokia Connects offered me the opportunity to trial their flagship Lumia 920 for a fortnight in March, I jumped at the chance to immerse myself in the experience. The last Nokia phone I’d owned was the slider  7650 model from way back in 2001 – I’d been a loyalist through the 1990s until then, but wandered into BlackBerry land for a couple of years after that. I’ve also had every iPhone model since the 3G and have in parallel tried Android devices running 2.2 through to 4.1. So, from both a hardware and software perspective, I guess I’ve got a fairly broad experience, and was intrigued to find how a Windows Phone from Nokia would suit my “power user” habits!

A couple of notes. Firstly, if I’m mixing tenses here it’s just because I’ve now returned the device per the trial arrangement. The other thing to point out is that I really did do road test of the phone for two weeks, to the extent of popping my nanoSIM into a microSIM adapter and using it for as much as I could. More on this to come.

The first thing to say is that the bright red Lumia 920 looked and felt fantastic in the hand, although it is substantially larger than the iPhone 5.

The Nokia 920, customised to taste

One tiny issue I felt that wasn’t considered was the central positioning of the camera lens and flash in the back of the device, which meant I’d often have my hand across it and needed to wipe it, but I suppose a case or skin might have reduced that. The screen was a visual treat, it looks stunning in day-to-day use, and was also very nice for watching the couple of videos I looked at while I had the Lumia. The iPhone took over most of my photographic life for many years (which is sad in many ways, I realise), and I’ve got thousands of photos stored on it. Coming back to the camera on the Lumia, apart from the seemingly more-frequent need to clean the lens, it produced some great results – although I did miss the HDR capability which might have levelled out some of the contrast in a few shots I attempted.

HDR would have helped with this early-morning shot

One particularly innovative feature of the camera on Windows Phone 8 is the concept of “lenses” – apps which can extend the basic function of the camera application itself. I also appreciated the way in which the Photos app enabled me to both browse my own Facebook and other social network albums, but also to see the latest content from my friends. Clever stuff. Oh, and SkyDrive let me get to the images straight away across different devices and on the web. +1 for sensible functionality. I vaguely missed Instagram for a couple of weeks, but I imagine that app will materialise for the platform before too long (and since the Instagram/Facebook “ToS-gate” I’ve largely moved back to Flickr or to dual posting anyway).

Rounding out the hardware commentary, I’ll add that the battery life was acceptable (I tended to pop the phone on charge whilst in the office and overnight, but it seemed on a par with my other device). I was also very happy with the performance of the phone – everything was extremely fluid and I didn’t encounter any hangups or freezes. Very slick.

Live tiles

Time, then, to talk about Windows Phone 8. I’ve admired the rebooted and reimagined Windows Phone UI from afar for a while now. After all that came before it in Windows Mobile efforts, it’s a bold and stunning revolution of a user experience – and I believe it is one that works.

It’s an interface that is alive, glanceable, and easy to use. The live tiles in particular are a game changer. The resizable tiled UI lives up to the selling point of true personalisation. More than that, the list of apps is one swipe away, and not only is is searchable, it’s super fast to jump to any lettered section of apps (sorted alphabetically – crazy, right?). I am a definite fan. I’m not yet convinced of the Modern UI / tiles in Windows 8 the desktop experience, but that’s more because of the janky need to switch between old and new paradigms to get some things done – for Xbox, tablet and phone, I think this is a useful approach.

The alphabetical list of apps is useful

I was pleased to be able to get back to my content and online services quickly, at least in relation to a subset of the apps I use regularly. Amazon (Kindle and Shop, plus a handy barcode scanner tile shortcut), Evernote, Last.fm, Spotify, Netflix, and Paypal were all present and correct. Twitter is covered by multiple apps (I chose Rowi), as is Facebook – although in the case of the latter most are fairly poor mobile web wrappers. There’s a giffgaff app already too, for all you giffgaffers out there!

However – and you may have seen this coming – the key missing parts of my daily workflow were all essentially app deficiencies. No 1Password, no good route planning apps for bus and train, no TomTom, no Feedly or Flipboard, no Instagram, no Google+ or Google Maps, or anything decent for YouTube.

Petty arguments between technology behemoths aside, I’d love to see more organisations taking Windows Phone seriously as a platform, as it does involve rethinking existing UI strategies, and I believe that the Modern UI is something here to stay across Microsoft devices. A few apps do exist for other things I use like BBC News, Github and Flickr, but all could do with an update or an “official” app to come along. I genuinely believe it is a mistake for organisations to ignore this platform.

Finally of course we reach “the prison I knowingly built myself” – and that is called Apple iCloud. The majority of my music is now stored there, and whilst the Windows Phone app for OS X was very effective at enabling me to sync iTunes playlists, I couldn’t just grab things from the cloud when I wanted. Messaging was particularly frustrating too, as I barely have any Windows Live or Skype contacts compared with the folks I interact with daily via iMessage. Messaging was annoying, as iPhone users tended to end up getting half of my conversations, some via text, and then missing things as they were logged in via their email address. I could see some great stuff in the Windows Contacts world, having groups of contacts whose updates I wanted to follow, but I wasn’t immersed enough for it to immediately work for me.

To round off on a high note – let’s talk about online management. Both Google and Microsoft seem to have this right, and Apple are living in the past. Using the My Windows Phone portal was great, and a better experience than even Android’s ability to send apps from Google Play to the phone – I liked the integrated view of SkyDrive, Xbox Live etc.

Thanks Nokia for a chance to play with your lovely device – definitely something I’d recommend to those looking to commit to a change and wanting a modern device. A few more apps, and a way out of my prison, and I’d be there myself…

Footnote:

A last, personal and slightly unrelated note – Microsoft are very lucky to have hired the man who persuaded me to leave IBM, Patrick Chanezon – Pat’s blog post about his choice in many ways mirrors my experience of dealing with Microsoft over the past few years – there’s a much more heterogeneous and open approach there now, and I wish him very well in the future, I had a great year at VMware working with him!

Related articles

• Nokia’s aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that’s not enough (hands-on) (theverge.com)
• New Lumia 925: This, loyalists, is the BIG ONE you’ve waited for (go.theregister.com)
• iPhone 5 vs. Galaxy S3 vs. Lumia 920: By the numbers (reviews.cnet.com)

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.

I’ll be live tweeting from the event, where Paul Maritz our CEO will be introducing the company and vision. You can also follow the @gopivotal Twitter ID, and check out the new website.

The story so far

There were two  M2M events on day one. The first was the M2M tutorial featuring some real hardware (Raspberry Pi and Arduino), using the Koneki Lua Development Tooling to deploy scripts to the embedded Mihini runtime on the Pi to drive and take input from sensors over Modbus. I cheated a little and mixed in a bit of MQTT using the Paho Lua client, to have my kit publishing temperature and light data to a broker instead It is early days for Eclipse Mihini, but it was a really slick demo and tutorial, and I’m looking forward to playing with this a lot more.

The evening Birds of a Feather session gave a group of us a couple of open hours to hack around with our Pi and Arduino kits. My own efforts were slightly thwarted by a European soldering iron and a 110V power supply, so I wasn’t able to assemble the add-on board I wanted for my Raspberry Pi, but I’ll get back to that in the future. For those looking to explore their new Raspberry Pis and hardware / GPIO interaction from Java, take a look at the pi4j project.

Building a community

One useful “war story” that was told today was in Benjamin Cabé’s Building the M2M Community talk. The slides will follow, but it was good to hear about the progress of the community and projects involved (yes, ok, I’m a Committer on one of them…) and also to hear about his “Community Manager Toolbox” for tracking and responding to community discussions. I use a very similar set of tools when I engage with the Cloud Foundry and MQTT communities (and others that I’m involved with).

Here’s a summary:

• Slideshare – monitor who favourites and downloads slides related to your project
• Twitter – monitor hashtags, engage complainers
• YouTube – screencasts, demos, build channel to aggregate content
• StackOverflow – answer questionss (even old ones), find answers that need to be complemented)
• Github – monitor forks, stars, look for people using your tech (include Gists)
• Google Alerts
• IFTTT – e.g. if Eclipse wiki changes get Gtalk notification recipe
• Google Analytics for your site
• LinkedIn – monitor groups, post news and relay blog posts

In short: Engage the community. Be very public about what you are working on and where the roadmap is going. Get management buy-in for your projects to persuade them of the value of opening them to the community (use metrics to demonstrate take-up).

Working on standards

The other thing that has been going on today “behind the scenes” at EclipseCon has been the first meeting of the OASIS MQTT Technical Committee. It is exciting to see that Richard Coppen and Raphael Cohn have been elected as co chairs of the group, with seven sponsoring organisations from across the technology and messaging market and 35 publically-visible members – lots of interest in MQTT!

There’s a LOT of content around the machine-to-machine space this year, and growing interest in how to use instrumented devices with an embedded runtime with lightweight messaging. If you’ve not been following the progress of the M2M community at Eclipse, we now have an M2M portal, along with nice pages for each of the three associated projects Koneki, Mihini, and Paho.

Almost the first thing I saw when I walked in yesterday was my buddy Benjamin Cabé assembling a bunch of electronics kits (Raspberry Pis and Arduino Unos) for today’s M2M tutorial which will use Eclipse Koneki and Mihini. This will be the first opportunity for many folks to play with the new Mihini runtime. Later this evening, we’ll have the chance to run a hackathon with things like Raspberry Pi and Orion and others parts as an extended Birds of a Feather.

What are some of the other M2M sessions to look out for?

• learn about building an open M2M community
• hear about how a 3D printer was hooked up to the web using MQTT
• listen to what Hitachi have been doing with M2M gateways
• understand how Koneki and Mihini can build M2M applications
• the TCF BoF may be of interest now that it can debug Raspberry Pi
• the IWG BoF will include folks from the M2M community

There’s also the first meeting of the OASIS TC for MQTT due this week, and a meeting of the Eclipse M2M Industry Working Group scheduled as well. Exciting times!

The corridor conversations and late night beer sessions are as always invaluable, and myself and many of the other project folks will be around – I’m always happy to talk about Paho in particular. At Paho we now have updated Java and C MQTT clients in Git (NB check the ‘develop’ branch for the latest Java updates), along with the Lua client, and proposed contributions of Objective-C, Javascript and Python clients are at various stages of review looking to join the project.

Oh, and if you are interested in MQTT, come and find me for some MQTT Inside stickers that you can use with your own hardware projects

Well, you’ve just published a book… it’s all about working digitally and online “in the cloud”… and you want to publicise it and bring readers and friends in on the gig in a social way. My friend Kate Russell is exactly that person – she’s just published Working the Cloud and decided (somewhat experimentally) to hold a book signing that all of her friends, fans and readers could take part in.

So last night, a number of Kate’s friends and colleagues got together in London and contributed to a live broadcast Google Hangout, while she chatted with invited remote guests, along with a few folks who wanted to get copies of the book signed. We were in a “party room” and able to dip in to the conversations when appropriate.

The evening was a lot of fun, and I think the result was some interesting conversations about doing business using cloud services, as well as some learning about how these kinds of events can work we even included some of my #techgrumps buddies in the hangout!

Just to be clear – I wasn’t just “ligging” here – I’ve been a fan of Kate’s through her work on Webscape and Click and other endeavours for many years, and have been able to meet her at a few tech events, so I was really delighted to be invited along. I bought my copy, and I’ve read the book this week (it’s a very approachable style and easy to get into), and so far I’m about 60% through. I’ve reviewed the book on Amazon too, but I won’t repeat that word-for-word here!

Working the Cloud is a great read, and if you have watched Kate online or on broadcast, I’d say it’s “very Kate” in style… when I’m reading I can often hear her chatting through the content in my head. That means it is down-to-earth, practical, and useful. I’d say it’s a book aimed more to the small-t0-medium business market where folks are just trying to get their head around moving to using cloud-based online services; but it is also a great read for anyone wanting to learn which services really do offer the most value, and as I’ve tweeted lately, it also has some superb content covering online branding, identity, and use of social tools for communications and engagement. I’ve been online since, well, I started to borrow the school 14400 baud modem to dial up BBSes during the school holidays in the 80s – pre-Internet – and I live and breathe the cloud space, so I’m always excited by a book which still manages to surprise me with new things I’d not tried or heard of before – this is one of those!

Oh, and if you do pick up a copy, check out the fun Aurasma-app-based additional content you can unlock by pointing your smartphone at the cover – and check out the nice app for iOS and Android that enables Kate to share more information to keep things up-to-date. Really nice thinking and a way to apply digital tools to the age-old problem of currency of information in printed material.

Summary – thanks Kate for inviting me along, and well done on a lovely book!

Yesterday, I turned 37.

1978 // 2012

I’m often mistaken as being younger than I am. At first that was funny, then it became annoying (mostly when every bar in the US demanded ID), and then it became flattering. I think…

A wrinkle

A couple of weeks ago, I had a wake-up call. I’ve shared the circumstances with a few of my closest friends and family via social networks, but up until now I’ve not been in “broadcast mode”.

For quite a while – I’ll say, randomly and intermittently over several years – I’ve experienced the sensation of a racing heart / palpitations. It has always settled down after a few minutes, after sitting down or breathing sensibly, so I’ve not thought anything of it.

The weekend before last, I was in bed, doing nothing… sat up to take a sip of water – and my heartbeat went crazy. I assumed things would be fine, but after about an hour of the same behaviour with a nagging feeling that it “should” have settled down by now, leading to a subconscious panic loop, probably making it worse, I headed to casualty / A&E (that’s the ER, for my US friends). Oh, this was at past midnight on a Friday night, in a London suburb.

I expected to be put on the back of a queue of more pressing cases, but was seen nearly immediately; wired up to oxygen and saline; measured with a peak heart rate of 211bpm; and discovered to be suffering from supraventricular tachycardia, aka SVT. Moments before I was medicated, my body set itself right, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been (aside from lasting 90-ish minutes…).

It’s a known issue, and through reading about it I’m going to say more than likely in my case exacerbated by a mad and over-macho caffeine habit (my “regular” coffee order has been 4-shot Americano… with Red Bull on the back end of the day), alcohol, and poor eating and sleeping habits (caused by personal issues also not broadcast). I’ve yet to bottom out the absolute cause if there is one, but I’m instrumenting myself with Fitbit and Withings to track my health far more thoroughly from now on[1]. Over the last 12 days I’ve mostly cut out caffeine. Intellectually, I know that this is a good thing… if only my body would catch up with the memo!

So, yep – 37 years young, probably long heading for a crash, and now my body delivers a wake-up call. I’ve long known I’m not in peak shape, leading the sedentary lifestyle of many a developer / techie. However – I’m fine, before folks fuss – and I’m getting the attention I need. The UK National Health Service was amazing in looking after me and reassuring me, and the next steps are down to a joint effort in proper diagnosis, and preventative measures.

Fun times… (!) I do want to thank a particular individual for getting me the help I needed when I needed it – my family for their love – and the close friends I’d previously shared this with for their support. Believe me that this is top of my list of priorities to “fix” – what techie enjoys a problem where the root cause is unknown? More detailed debugging is required!

Oh – and a totally self-serving finale to this post – if you follow me online and want to say “thank you” or whatever for my contributions to the interwebz, I have various online wish lists, but feel free to wish me a belated happy birthday via Amazon

[1] hoping to learn from Dan Hon’s Quantified Self adventure. So far, I’m learning that my blood pressure needs a rest…

Note: comments closed on this one. You know where to find me online!

Related articles

• My Not-So-Crazy Supraventricular Tachycardia Update (saltyrunning.com)

Image via http://hardergeneration.org/2012/10/16/jiro-dreams-of-sushi-official-trailer/

Evidently the UK is substantially behind the rest of the world in getting this documentary on release – it’s apparently available to stream on Netflix in the US already, but only arrived in the cinemas here a fortnight ago. Ho-hum.

So, in a nutshell, it’s a film about an 85-year-old man who has been making sushi for a living for 70 years, and works with his eldest son in a 10-seat restaurant in an Tokyo subway station. So far, so quirky.

A few things elevate this documentary to a far more worthy status, though. The cinematography was thoughtful and beautiful; it was nicely paced; I learned a lot about the thinking of the individuals featured. I also came to realise how what I know as sushi, simply is not what Jiro serves to his patrons. What we consume from supermarkets, chains with conveyor belts, even the “good” individual sushi restaurants I’ve visited in London, is more mass market, mass produced popular style raw fish dishes.

Jiro is a craftsman – so are his sons and other apprentices. He’s obsessive, and he aspires to be better every day.

That’s interesting, because tomorrow is the Monkigras – Redmonk’s “craft beer-and-developer craft” event – and the theme this time is Scaling Craft. Over the past few weeks I’ve been back and forth with my very good friend James Governor about the topic of craft, and how it applies in software and technology. I think, after watching Jiro, I have a far better understanding than in the past. Interestingly, afterwards I had a discussion about professionalism, chartering / accreditation, the bcs, and whether or not professions exist to act as a barrier to entry or as an encouragement towards craftsmanship, too. I wonder how those themes will be reflected throughout Monkigras this year.

For what it’s worth, I had proposed a Monkigras talk taking the concept of glass and the craft of glassmaking and applying some technology themes, but unfortunately I’ve not been able to pull it together in time this time around. I’m looking forward to learning and soaking up the atmosphere (and seeing good friends from across the community) again, instead!

Oh, and if fish and subtitles are not your taste, I’d still encourage giving Jiro Dreams of Sushi a try – if not, on a technology topic instead, you really should watch Indie Game The Movie, the best documentary I watched last year and a fascinating insight into programming, obsession, and the gaming industry.

It turns out that these guys are spending a lot of time with Javascript lately and the brief was to review The Node Beginner Book. We did talk about it for a bit, but I probably talked too much earlier in the show because I was getting excited about all the cool stuff happening around Cloud Foundry lately

This was my first use of the Google+ Hangouts On Air feature, which allows content producers to publically stream the group chat to a YouTube account. I have to say that I was extremely impressed. We used the lower thirds feature from the Hangouts Toolbox plugin to do titles, and I’m sure there were a bunch of other handy add-on features we could have used to enhance the experience too.

It was great to be able to respond to viewer questions coming in via Twitter, and I’d like to thank my colleague Raja for his cool node app examples (don’t forget to check out nodelogger which uses the Cloud Foundry authentication features too). A shout-out to Brian McClain for bailing me out when I forgot the features of my own product, too…!

All-in-all, a really enjoyable discussion, and I’d love to take part in that show again sometime – smart guys! They’ve posted a nice recap post if you’d like to check them out.

QOTD: "If we don't embrace diversity and the polyglot nature of software, then we're not going to evolve" via @andypiper on #DifferentSpokes

—
CloudSpokesCommunity (@CloudSpokes) January 30, 2013

Last year was one full of changes for me, not all of which are things I’ve posted about online - those who know me well know that I had an “interesting” year! Like many folks, I’ve just gone through the corporate annual review cycle, and that was a good chance to think over what I got up to in 2012.

Looking back

I’m not going to quote word for word from what I submitted in my review, but pick out some of my personal highlights:

• I’ve had a blast in the Cloud Foundry team, and particularly feel at home with my Developer Advocate colleagues. I was able to co-present sessions with Monica at MongoDB UK (she’s now moved on to more awesomeness), and Raja at our Cloud Foundry Open Tour event in London… I co-wrote a Cloud Foundry and Spring article for JAX with the legendary Josh… and in the past few weeks I’ve been working more with Raja and others on some new content that is coming soon. Teamwork and collaboration FTW
• I built a few simple samples for Cloud Foundry – not quite the uber-app that I had planned, that’s still in my head – and learned a bunch of new (to me) languages and technologies in a short period of time.
• I’m very pleased with my “reach” in terms of audiences, talks, and the numbers of people referring to videos, screencasts and slidecasts I built in the past 12 months. Always room to improve!
• I had an excellent time working with our Cloud Foundry ecosystem partners and friends in 2012, getting to know Diane, Adron, the Uhuru team, AppFog, etc. For me, the partners and community around Cloud Foundry are what make my role a real pleasure.

Beyond the day job, I did a bunch of other things last year, too:

Looking forward

So that was last year, and it’s late January already – way past time to think about how 2013 will shape up. Despite my good buddy James Governor not doing New Year’s Resolutions, I made myself a short list of things I want to focus on this year – and ignoring some of what he says, I am actually going to try to follow through…

• Be as awesome as possible in my role on the Cloud Foundry team. I work with great people and they deserve the best I can offer. Looking forward to seeing where the Pivotal Initiative takes us, and there are some great things happening!
• Attend fewer events in one week / month. A couple of times last year, I definitely pushed myself too hard. In the London tech scene you can pretty much choose from 2 or 3 good developer meetups on any evening of the week, and I over-committed on several occasions. I’m also going to be more picky about exactly how I get involved in them… I loved all of the events I crewed for last year, but I scheduled things poorly and need to cut back.
• Blog more frequently. Yes, this is the obvious one… but I really do want to, and have intended to for a long time. I have moments where I compose whole blog entries in my head while I sit on the train, and I wish they could just be transcribed in the moment. I do regret having let other social sites take over my online presence, particularly when it comes to the end of a year with the chance to look back. I should have been able to link every “big event” in the lists above, back to a blog post about what happened. So, I’m committing myself to writing more again this year.
• Improve my Ruby and Javascript skills. I’ve started out well on this with a couple of projects I’ve been tinkering with lately.
• Make cool things. LEGO things. Raspberry Pi things. Arduino things. I want to learn, hack, and make more. I talk about Maker culture, and I want to remind myself that I’m part of it.
• Focus on improving my public speaking habits. I know I sometimes talk too quickly, get sidetracked, etc… every time I listen back or watch a talk I gave, I spot another thing I want to adjust. I think this is one of those lifetime improvement resolutions more than it is something I can “fix” in a 12 month period, but it’s certainly an area I want to look at.
• Take. Proper. Holidays. I nearly managed to entirely detach from Twitter over the Christmas period, and definitely didn’t keep checking my work email, for the first time in many years. It felt good. I want to do that more often from now on.

Seven simple (?!) thoughts. I guess the only one that will easily be measurable by watching my blog will be the one about writing more, and this is my start on that one!

Happy 2013, friends – hope to see you soon!

Related articles

• Making a Cleaner Cloud (slideshare.net)

I’m primarily here to talk with folks about Cloud Foundry, of course – I’ll spend some time on the Solutions Center floor today doing so. Another important reason that I wanted to be here, as a new employee of just under five months, was to soak up the broader story around the VMware story and portfolio – there’s some very cool stuff happening around cloud, virtualisation, and end user computing and I’m excited to hear what gets announced during the keynotes this week.

If you are attending, do try to get along to the Cloud Foundry Bootcamp session (Monday pm), or some of the other Cloud Foundry and BOSH sessions that are on the agenda – I was really pleased to have met folks like Brian McClain already and to have reconnected with friends like Dave McCrory and the legendary Josh Long who are involved with some of these sessions.

First impressions? big, lots of energy. Exciting. Love the range of chillout activities (foosball, air hockey, video game cabinets, board games and LEGO!) in the Hang Space. Love the social aspects with a giant 360 degree LED display showing tweets, photos etc, and a Socialcast site setup for the attendees to network. There’s a lot to explore in the Solutions Center. It is going to be a busy week! Do come and introduce yourself and say hi if you’re here… always delighted to meet new folks… and of course I’m tweeting like crazy about the event and announcements as well, so feel free to follow me online to learn more.

One of the goals of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) – like Cloud Foundry – is to enable developers to be more productive, more quickly. It’s about getting out of the way, removing the barriers and setup steps, and enabling developers to write and deploy great code as quickly as possible.

Something I’ve needed to do fairly often since starting work with Cloud Foundry is to quickly put up a “static” web site. The platform supports a number of runtimes and frameworks (Java, Ruby, node.js etc) but it doesn’t currently[1] have an runtime type of “website”. So, I can’t simply put together a bunch of HTML, CSS, images and client-side Javascript files, run vmc push, and have my site online on cloudfoundry.com – I need an “application” to serve the web content.

That’s exactly what my sinatra-static-web project does for me. I’ve found that it’s a very handy and quick template application which enables me to get simple static sites up on Cloud Foundry, and a good starting point to build out from if I want to stretch my Ruby skills

To use it, simply fork or clone the project using Git; replace the entire contents of the public directory with your HTML, CSS and JS files (with an index.html file as the main page); potentially adjust a couple of settings in the web.rb file; and vmc push the app. You can take a look at the sample site I’ve added to the app, of course… it’s just a load of junk content based on Twitter Bootstrap and with some random Lorem Ipsum-style text to fill it out.

There’s no real need to go near the code, and it is trivial at any rate – but let’s take a quick look.

# a super-trivial Sinatra-based webserver
# for static content
require 'sinatra'

# set all the settings!

configure do
  # this is arguably not necessary... 'public'
  # folder is the static content location by default
  set :public_folder, 'public'

  # optionally configure Cache-Control headers on responses
  # set :static_cache_control, [:public, :max_age => 300]

  # if using mime types not known to Sinatra, uncomment and
  # configure here (by file extension)
  # mime_type :foo, 'text/foo'
end

# serve the files!

# route to starting page (index.html)
get "/" do
  redirect '/index.html'
end

# route to custom error page (404.html)
not_found do
  redirect '/404.html'
end

The code uses the super-handy Sinatra framework for Ruby, which allows an application with multiple URLs to be defined very quickly. In this case, we simply declare a dependency on Sinatra; set the public folder as the one where the static content resides; and then create a default route, so that when a user hits our root URL / they are redirected to the index.html file. We also create an error route so that if the user hits a URL that doesn’t exist, they receive a customised but simple 404 error page (assuming that such a file exists in the public folder!).

As you can see, there’s really only a few lines of code here, and the rest is handled by the framework. I’ve commented out a couple of optional parameters that can be used if desired, but without any changes this will serve the contents of the public folder perfectly happily.

I’ve used this a few times now, for sites of varying levels of complexity – in particular the resources site I created for Cloud Foundry’s sponsorship of Young Rewired State was based on this (the source code is on Github if you want to take a look at that, too – it’s understandably extremely similar!). I was also able to use it to help a number of students who I worked with at YRS 2012 to get their sites online. More on YRS, shortly…

Just a simple little resource that you might find handy for prototyping your next web UI – you don’t even need to know Ruby, Java, or node.js to get going!

[1] … note that I’m not saying that Cloud Foundry should have or will have such a type of container in the future – but the code base is Open Source, so there’s every chance that someone will come along and add this kind of thing one day!

Update 05 March 2013: I just pushed a few changes to the app to reflect a slight change in the way Sinatra apps work on Cloud Foundry now. Use the source!

I’ve recently become aware of just how pervasive YouTube has become. It’s available on a range of “computer” platforms – desktops and laptops, mobile phones and tablets. I’m able to access it via AppleTV, XBox, and a Sony Bluray player. Friends who recently updated their home media setup have it on their internet-enabled TV as well as via their Virgin Tivo box on the same “system”. Alongside BBC iPlayer, it’s actually more pervasive in the UK across the various devices many of us have in our living rooms, than the broadcast DTV/satellite/cable channels themselves. It’s also noticeably more present across a very broad range of devices, than alternatives like Vimeo which are arguably better at presenting more beautiful, longer HD content on the web itself.

This is both exciting, and also potentially problematic.

For those of us who have been seeing a multichannel, multimedia future ahead for some time, it’s a validation of the success of streaming web video in breaking the monopolies of the existing broadcasters and media companies. Over time, Google has added some tremendous value to YouTube – enabling creators to rapidly upload, perform simple edits, add soundtracks, and share content all within a rich HTML browser experience. It is also easy to reach a wide range of devices simply by ticking the “make this video available to mobile” box on the video management page – Google does all the heavy lifting of transcoding, resizing, and deciding on whether Flash or HTML5 is a better delivery mechanism, etc.

However, at the same time, it’s kind of… well, clunky. In order to consume content from YouTube on any of the platforms I mentioned before, you have to visit a dedicated YouTube widget, app or channel and then navigate around content within that box (oh, and each platform has a slightly different way of presenting that content). It’s not integrated with the viewing experience – I can’t just say to my TV or viewing device, “show me videos of kittens” and have it aggregate between different sources which include YouTube. Not only that, but we all know just how variable YouTube content can be, both in terms of production quality, duration, and the antisocial nature of comments and social interactions around videos. For some of the most popular videos I’ve posted on my channel, I can’t tell you how long I spend on moderating the most unbelievably asinine comments! Oh and, when we consider the increasing use of streaming video online – be it iPlayer, YouTube, Netflix or any other source – we constantly have to consider the impact on available bandwidth. Bandwidth and connectivity are not universal, no matter how much we may wish they were.

The other side of this is the group of voices who will point to the dominance of Google and their influence over brands and advertising. All very well, but I like to remind people that for all of the amazing “free” services we enjoy (Facebook, Twitter, Google and others), we do have to pay with an acceptance of advertising, and/or sharing of some personal data of our choice – or go back to paying cable and satellite providers for their services. It’s really a simple transaction.

I guess I don’t really have a message with this blog entry, other than to share my observation of the amazingly rapid rise of the new media titan(s). If I was going to offer any further thoughts or advice, it would be the following:

• explore online video services more – you probably have access to them in more places than you think.
• remember that video you produce may be viewed on any device from the smaller mobile handsets, to a nice HD television – so always try to produce your content at the highest quality setting possible, and let YouTube or the other video hosts do the rest.
• richly tag and describe your content to make it easier to find. “Video1.mov” tells me nothing.
• learn about the parameters which control how your content is displayed. I’ve previously written about this; the content is still useful but I should probably create an update.

This omnipresence across platforms is one of the reasons why I’ve started to primarily use my YouTube channel as the canonical source for all of my video content. Previously I’d used Viddler and Vimeo and occasionally posted a clip to Facebook, but now that I am able to post longer movies, I’ve also posted the full videos of various talks that I’d only previously been able to host at Vimeo. I’m not abandoning all other sources, but a focus on one channel makes a certain amount of sense.

overheating in an office with no comfort cooling or aircon. About to drink water.

—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) February 21, 2007

I remember discussing this exciting cool “new Web 2.0 site” with Kim Plowright @mildlydiverting in Roo’s office in Hursley a couple of days before, and before long he, Ian and I were all trying this new newness out. It was just before the 2007 SXSWi, where Twitter really started to get on the radar of the geekerati.

But wait a moment! It’s impossible to pull back more than just over the last 3,000 tweets using the API, so how was I able to get all the way back to 5 years ago and display that tweet when I’ve got over 33,000 of them to my name?

It’s a relatively little-known fact that you can ask Twitter to disclose everything they hold associated with your account – and they will (at least, in certain jurisdictions – I’m not sure whether they will do this for every single user but in the EU they are legally bound to do so). I learned about this recently after reading Anne Helmond’s blog entry on the subject, and decided to follow the process through. I first contacted Twitter on April 24, and a few days later faxed (!) them my identity documentation, most of which was “redacted” by me Yesterday, May 11, a very large zip file arrived via email.

I say very large, but actually it was smaller than the information dump that Anne received. Her tweets were delivered as 50Mb of files, but mine came in nearer to 9Mb zipped – 17Mb unzipped. I’d expected a gigantic amount of data in relation to my tweets, but it seems as though they have recently revised their process and now only provide the basic metadata about each one rather than a whole JSON dump.

So my entire archive of Tweets back to Feb 2007 is a ~8Mb text file (140 chars per tweet+metadata).

—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) May 11, 2012

So, what do you get for your trouble? Here’s the list of contents, as outlined by Twitter’s legal department in their email to me.

- USERNAME-account.txt: Basic information about your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-email-address-history.txt: Any records of changes of the email address on file for your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-tweets.txt: Tweets of your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-favorites.txt: Favorites of your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-dms.txt: Direct messages of your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-contacts.txt: Any contacts imported by your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-following.txt: Accounts followed by your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-followers.txt: Accounts that follow your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-lists_created.txt: Any lists created by your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-lists_subscribed.txt: Any lists subscribed to by your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-lists-member.txt: Any public lists that include your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-saved-searches.txt: Any searches saved by your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-ip.txt: Logins to your Twitter account and associated IP addresses.

- USERNAME-devices.txt: Any records of a mobile device that you registered to your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-facebook-connected.txt: Any records of a Facebook account connected to your Twitter account.

- USERNAME-screen-name-changes.txt: Any records of changes to your Twitter username.

- USERNAME-media.zip: Images uploaded using Twitter’s photo hosting service (attached only if your account has such images).

- other-sources.txt: Links and authenticated API calls that provide information about your Twitter account in real time.

Of these, let’s dig a bit more deeply into just a few of the items, no need to pick everything to pieces.

The “tracking data” is contained in andypiper-devices.txt and andypiper-ipaudit.txt – interesting. The devices file essentially contains information on my phone, presumably for the SMS feature. They know my number and the carrier. The IP address list tracks back to the start of March, so they have 2 months of data on what IPs have been used to access my account. I’ve yet to subject that to a lot of scrutiny to check where those are located, that’s another script I need to write.

I took a look at andypiper-contacts.txt and was astonished to find out how much of my contact data Twitter’s friend finder and mobile apps had slurped up. I mean, I don’t even have all of this in my address book… given the fact that the information contained the sender email addresses for various online retailer newsletters, I’m guessing that Google’s API (I’m a Gmail user) probably coughed up not just my defined contact list, but also all of the email addresses from anyone I’d ever heard from, ever.

Twitter has on record 981 phone numbers and 8741 email addresses from my contacts / when I've used Find Friends :-o deleting that...

—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) May 11, 2012

Fortunately, there’s a way to remove this information permanently, which Anne has written about. I went ahead and did that, and then Twitter warned me that the Who To Follow suggestions might not be so relevant. That’s OK because I don’t use that feature anyway – and in practice, I’ve noticed no difference in the past 24 hours!

I use DMs a lot for quick communication, particularly with colleagues (it was a pretty reliable way of contacting @andysc when I needed him at IBM!). That’s reflected in the size of andypiper-dms.txt, which is also a scary reminder to myself that I used to delete them, but since Twitter now makes it harder to get to and delete DMs, I’ve stopped removing them and there’s a lot of private data I wish I’d scrubbed.

Taking a peek at the early tweets in andypiper-tweets, I’m trying to remember when the @reply syntax was formalised and when Twitter themselves started creating links to the other person’s profile. Many of my early tweets refer to @roo and @epred and I don’t think they ever went by those handles. 5 years is a long time.

I mentioned that the format used to deliver the data appears to have changed since Anne made her request. She got a file containing a JSON dump of each tweet including metadata like retweet information, in_reply_to, geo, etc etc.. By comparison, I now have simply creation info, status ID (the magic that lets you get back to the tweets via web UI), and the text itself:

********************
user_id: 786491
created_at: Wed Feb 21 15:43:54 +0000 2007
created_via: web
status_id: 5623961
text: overheating in an office with no 
comfort cooling or aircon. About to drink water.

It’s a real shame that they have taken this approach, as it means the data is now far more cumbersome to parse and work with. However, using some shell scripts I did some simple slicing-and-dicing because I was curious how my use of Twitter had grown over time. Here’s a chart showing the numbers of tweets I posted per year (2012 is a “to date” figure of course). It looks like it was slow growth initially but last year I suddenly nearly doubled my output.

Still considering what other analysis I’d like to do. I can chart out the client applications I’ve used, or make a word cloud showing how my conversational topics have changed over time… now that all of the information is mine, that is. It is just a shame I have to do so much manual munging of the output beforehand.

Oh, and the email I received from Twitter Legal also said:

No records were found of any disclosure to law enforcement of information about your Twitter account.

So, that’s alright then…

Why did I do this? firstly, because I believe in the Open Web and ownership of my own data. Secondly, because I hope that I’ll now be able to archive this personal history and make it searchable via a tool like ThinkUp (which I’ve been running for a while now, but not for the whole 5 years). Lastly… no, not “because I could”… well OK at least partly because I could… because I believe that companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and others should be fully transparent with their users and the data they hold, and that by going through this currently-slightly-painful procedure it will encourage Twitter to put in place formal tools to provide this level of access to everyone in a frictionless manner.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to dig around some more…

Then

On Saturday I went along to the Horizons 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum event, organised by Paul Squires and Leila Johnston and held at the BFI in London. The event ran on both days but I wasn’t able to stay on the Sunday, so I missed at least half of the fun!

Although I’m full of nostalgia for the 8-bit era, I have to confess I never actually owned a Speccy or any Sinclair hardware. My friends did, but I was primarily an Acorn enthusiast and our first home computer was an Electron (although the first computer I used at primary school was a Commodore PET).

Me: c.1985 Acorn Electron, A3000, Risc PC, Acorn A4, and then onto Dell PCs, homebuilt Linux PCs and Thinkpads. Apple from 2007. #sflzx

—
Andy Piper (@andypiper) May 05, 2012

I fondly remember some of the hacks I did on/with/to the Electron, including soldering a pair of headphones into the motherboard to avoid annoying my parents with the music from various Superior Software titles

Regardless of “allegiance”, Horizons was a really great day. Highlights for me included a fantastic history of computing by PJ Evans from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (if you haven’t been there yet, you should visit!); Spectranet, an Ethernet adapter for the Spectrum which had me wanting one for no good excuse that I can come up with; and the mind-blowing live composition of a chip tune by Matt Westcott which I saw, but I struggled to comprehend. Matt’s ability to reverse engineer a tune in his head was remarkable.

Oh, and if you haven’t downloaded or bought MJ Hibbett‘s Hey Hey 16k yet, or at least streamed it, you really should.

aside: since Horizons was part of SciFi London, I tried to get Micro Men director Saul Metzstein to drop some hints about his upcoming S7 Dr Who episodes. All he would say was that the western episodes were filmed in Spain (knew that), and that the script for the Christmas episode hasn’t been written yet (didn’t know that).

Now

After the event on Saturday evening, I found it a real struggle to avoid crazy, nostalgia-fuelled eBay purchases, but I did manage to resist! Instead, I resolved to finally get around to building the Fignition I’d picked up at the Hack to the Future event a couple of months ago.

For those who are not familiar with it, the Fignition is a credit card sized build-it-yourself 8-bit computer based around the ATMega chip (the same one used in the Arduino and Nanode Open Source hardware boards). It’s really a remarkable little device – I guess it took me about an hour to assemble and solder, although your mileage may vary. The build guide is excellent and very clear. After performing a couple of power on tests with and without the ICs inserted, it was time to connect up to the TV – and it worked first time. It boots into a simplified Forth environment, which was reminiscent of that BBC BASIC> prompt I am so familiar with from my childhood. The only real downside is that the keyboard – built from 8 clicker buttons – is a bit fiddly to get to grips with, but hey – I just assembled a complete 8-bit computer including video out and keyboard! It’s hard not to be excited.

The board I built was a RevD – the new RevE board has onboard audio in/out (get ready for some fun loading stuff from audio cassettes, again!), and is also slightly modified so that in principle, it is possible to add Arduino-footprint shields. That’s kind of cool, as it means that it might be possible to add a PS/2 keyboard or a network interface.

What’s “the point” of something so simple, by today’s standards? Well, actually – the simplicity. I went from a bag of components, to a fully working computer in the palm of my hand – no surface-mount components – to a programmable device. It’s “primitive” by the standards of today’s machines, but it’s not that hard to understand how an 8-bit “brain” works, in comparison to the 32 or 64-bit mulitcore CPUs and GPUs in modern laptops and mobile phones. In my opinion, the Fignition, Arduino and Nanode fulfil an important role in helping youngsters to understand the basic principles of electronics and computing.

Next

Last night I headed along to the fantastic Mozilla offices in London.

The main LJC event was Simon Maple from IBM showing off the new WebSphere 8.5 Liberty Profile running on a Raspberry Pi. I’d hooked Simon up with Sukkin Pang recently so that he could get one of the smart enclosures he provides for the Pi. It was pretty cool to see a full Java app server running on such a small computer – actually almost exactly the same size as the Fignition, only considerably more powerful of course.

The whole talk was live streamed on Mozilla Air – but if you missed it, there’s a video available (complete with semi-professional heckling from yours truly!)

What stole the evening for me, though, was two other glimpses of what lies ahead. First, Tom Banks from IBM Hursley came on stage after Simon and showed off the Liberty profile running on a mobile phone. Let me clarify – he was running Android 2.3 on a Nexus One (an “old” phone), running Ubuntu Linux as a virtual image inside of that, and WebSphere inside of that. Kind of mind-blowing! A proof-of-concept and arguably not very useful… not sure when I would want to put a full JEE app server in a phone… but extremely cool. Finally, @cyberdees let Tom and I have a play with Boot to Gecko – Mozilla’s new mobile play. B2G was something I’d heard about, but not touched. I have to say that even in an early form, it’s looking very slick, boots extremely fast – much more quickly than any Android or iOS device I’ve seen – and the device integration (GPS, camera, access to hardware settings, etc) was impressive.

With the Open Web as the platform, ubiquitous mobile devices, and increasingly sophisticated cloud-based backends to interact with, the future is looking pretty cool.

The “pre-shaved yak”, of course, is one aspect of what a polyglot open source PaaS is all about – delivering a ready-made, ready-to-host, application runtime environment. We shaved the yak, so you can just go ahead and get productive with your development tool of choice, be that vi or emacs, Notepad or TextMate, or Eclipse / a.n.other IDE. Grab a micro Cloud Foundry VM image and take your pre-shaved yak with you when you’re not connected!

I actually started to write this post in order to comment on something that’s a bit more hairy that, though! I’ve been playing around a little bit with MonoDevelop and ASP.NET (for reasons that will become apparent during this week, I suspect). I’m using the current stable Mono (2.10) and MonoDevelop (2.8) packages on Lion, and they seem to work well. I’ve also recently been learning about Sinatra, the lightweight web framework for Ruby, and one of the node.js equivalents called Express. It turns out that the .NET world has a bunch of Sinatra-wannabes, the most popular of which appears to be Nancy (see what they did there…? dive into the world of Sinatra-themed name-related web frameworks…!).

Nancy’s site recommends installation via NuGet, which is evidently really well integrated into Visual Studio (NuGet is the equivalent of gem in Ruby, or npm in node.js). Unfortunately there’s no MonoDevelop equivalent. Here’s where the yak shaving started! The NuGet FAQ claims that the command line NuGet.exe will run and can be compiled under Mono, but in my experience, that’s not quite true – I could not get the source to compile in MonoDevelop on OS X. I grabbed the pre-compiled version and followed the instruction to get it to update itself (basically you just run it, and it bootstraps and downloads the latest available)… that went fine, but after that, it would no longer work and produced a huge stack trace.

So here, after getting most of a yak’s fleece all over me, is the secret. The prebuilt NuGet.exe will work under Mono on OS X, but it does require a Windows .NET 4.0 DLL (Microsoft.Build.dll) to be in the same directory / locatable in the path – I grabbed mine from my Windows VM install. It also requires that you tell Mono to present a v4.0 runtime. So I whipped up a tiny script to avoid having to type a bunch of paths and switches each time.

Further results of this recent dalliance in .NET land will be coming soon…

(if you can hear any background noise on this one, it was because I was at the Scala Days event in London on the day we spoke, and not Michael’s fault at all! I don’t think it sounds too bad)

Coming up this week, there’s the big Cloud Foundry Open Tour London on Tuesday (based on the numbers I’m hearing about, it sounds like that is going to be busy). Many of us from the engineering and developer relations teams will be speaking at that one. The rest of the week, I’ll be at SourceDevCon in London where my head honcho Patrick will be speaking on Thursday afternoon.

To round the week off, there’s Horizons at the BFI on Saturday and Sunday, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum. I was always more of an Acorn guy myself, but there’s no denying these classic machines really kickstarted my interest in this role space – and I can’t wait to hear MJ Hibbett perform “Hey Hey 16k” in person!

Related articles

• First week with VMware and Cloud Foundry (andypiper.co.uk)
• My next steps – joining the Cloud Foundry team (andypiper.co.uk)

I grabbed an ISO this morning (64-bit desktop version, natch), and quickly setup a new virtual machine to run on my Mac. A nice feature of VMware Fusion 4.0 is the “easy install” option which lets you rapidly pop in the basic information needed to setup the system, and the rest is taken care of for you.

In my case, I specified a user ID, selected that I wanted my home folder read/write shared into the VM, and then customised the machine to up the memory and add a CPU core. In a few minutes (my machine has an SSD…!) I had a new virtual machine, running full screen in a separate space on Mission Control. Fusion even took care of installing VMware Tools so it was able to do the file sharing, use the full screen resolution etc etc straight away.

So… first impressions? Much more slick than 11.10 which I was using on a daily basis until recently. In particular, the configuration options have been streamlined really nicely. I’m still struggling with discovery of applications in Unity but in general, it’s not bad at all.

Browsing through the available packages, I was interested to find that the Cloud Foundry tools are available in the default repositories:

That’s awesome! you can just run sudo apt-get install cloudfoundry-client and get the main tool for deploying apps and administering Cloud Foundry right from the repository using the regular apt method (actually this is simply a convenience package – under the covers it installs a package called ruby-vmc, which installs the vmc command-line Ruby gem… it’s nice that the Ubuntu guys have made it easier to discover, though).

So what’s the problem? Well – no big deal, but actually, if you want to keep up with Cloud Foundry as a developing platform, you might want to grab something slightly newer than what is available on tap in the repository. As I write this, the version of vmc available via the cloudfoundry-client package is 0.3.10 and the one we’re currently working with is at least 0.3.16.

My suggestion, therefore, is to do the following:

1. Install rvm (Ruby Version Manager). That way, you can have different versions of Ruby itself installed, manage gems for the different versions independently, and also – importantly – not require root privileges to do your development work and install additional gems. A handy guide to installing rvm on Ubuntu is here, and it still works fine on 12.04. Just follow the commands shown in the Installing RVM and Installing Ruby sections and you should be all set and rocking ruby-1.9.2 on your new 12.04 setup.
   (I’m using rvm and JewelryBox to manage Ruby versions on OS X, incidentally. Great tools)
2. Run either gem install vmc or gem install vmc --pre (the latter option will get you the very latest pre-release of vmc, if you like the bleeding edge). Note that, if you installed rvm and Ruby successfully, you should not need root permissions to install gems.
3. There is no step 3 — vmc target http://api.cloudfoundry.com and then vmc login and you should be good to go. Looking for a sample app to deploy? You could take a look at the Sinatra example I added to the cloudfoundry-samples repository on Github last week…

It’s fantastic that Ubuntu is moving towards strong desktop / development environment support for Cloud Foundry.

Oh, there’s another story with Precise Pangolin,  too – you can rapidly install the server side pieces to build your own cloud using the Juju Charms which provide Cloud Foundry support. But… that’s a story for another post, in another time and place….

Update 15/05: I raised bug #998111 against Ubuntu to ask for the ruby-vmc package to be updated, in case you feel like tracking progress via Launchpad.

Well – that was bracing!

I don’t expect to be posting “week notes” like this on a regular basis, but as a one-off it seems like a nice way to encapsulate just how much happened in the first week of my new role.

Tuesday

Joined VMware. Met new colleagues in London office. Started to look at the User Account and Authentication component in Cloud Foundry. Ran samples against cloudfoundry.com, modified the documentation. Issued first GitHub pull request

Wednesday

More hacking on samples. Updated the Cloud Foundry Google+ page. Agreed to present Cloud Foundry at the London Real-Time hack weekend for the RabbitMQ guys. Watched (and tweeted) the live webcast of the Cloud Foundry first birthday event in San Francisco – very exciting news! “more clouds, more community, more code“, including a broader range of partners, a new governance process around the cloudfoundry.org Open Source project, and the announcement of BOSH being released to the community, too – multi-cloud deployment, here we come!

Thursday

Trip to the VMware Frimley office for some HR stuff. First call with full Developer Relations team for event planning. Briefing with the two directors I work for. Nothing to see here, move along…

Friday

Setup new laptop (custom order from Apple so there was a small delay). Prepped for demo at London Real-Time. Started making a lot of noise on VMware Link (aka Socialcast, the social sharing/discussion platform) internally

Saturday

My first speaking gig – a Lightning Introduction to Cloud Foundry, taking Chris Richardson’s much more comprehensive Boot Camp presentation and cramming the essentials into ~15 min including a live demo, for a bunch of hackers at London Real-Time.

Oh, and it was caught on video.

Four or five of the hacks ended up running on Cloud Foundry, too, which I think was rather nice I was also interviewed on realtime and the importance of cloud at the event, but I’ve not seen that video appear just yet.

Monday

More laptop setup, HR stuff. Prep for Scala Days. Started to improve a sample app (Ruby/Sinatra) I’d used in the past by adding Twitter Bootstrap and restructuring the code.

Tuesday/Wednesday

Scala Days in London – helping to man the sponsor stand talking about Cloud Foundry, answering questions, and meeting many new colleagues from the US who were presenting on Spring, Scala, and Cloud Foundry (including an announcement that Play 2.0 framework support and standalone apps are coming to cloudfoundry.com Real Soon Now). Recorded a podcast interview with Uhuru about what a Developer Advocate does.

Summary

I’m pleased that I was able to be so productive so quickly. I’d had a little previous experience with Cloud Foundry but it’s a testament to how quick it is to learn the basics and get moving that I was able to rapidly start playing with a bunch of code. It was also exciting to be out on Github on my first day – not something I could have done in a former life… it’s nice to be working in an organisation that is innovating with Open Source at this level.

There’s much to learn, and to be honest, a couple of the key aspects of Cloud Foundry actually make it more challenging (and interesting) for me to get to grips with. It’s open, and with BOSH, can potentially target different IaaS offerings (initially vSphere and the beginnings of AWS support; a hackathon yesterday aimed at adding OpenStack to the list) – so suddenly I need to know about those. It’s a polyglot platform, which means I need to broaden my language knowledge – I’m already making a start on Ruby and node.js, to complement existing Java and PHP knowledge.

It’s also exciting to learn more about what VMware does, the layers of technology that they offer, and their vision. My previous experience has primarily been with the desktop virtualisation technology, but there’s a huge and vibrant community around the server-side virtualisation tools, and products like Socialcast, Sliderocket and Zimbra in the collaboration space too.

There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in this space. It’s thrilling to be here. Thanks to all of my new colleagues for a warm welcome and support – looking forward to working with you!

This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.

• from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
  • the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
  • it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
  • you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.

• for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Grady wrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
• I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
• I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.

Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!

The initial proposal and setup stages have taken a little while, but this week the initial availability of the C client code was announced on the Paho mailing list (Java will follow shortly).

Paho Quickstart

This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide – better documentation etc will emerge over time – but I thought I’d post a quick guide as a kickstart for anyone wanting to give it a look. I did this on 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 – similar steps will apply on other Linux or UNIX platforms (note, the initial code contribution has a Makefile with rules which should work on UNIX, Windows, or z/OS).

Install the necessary packages to build code. NB git is for grabbing the source from Eclipse; build-essentials is a metapackage providing gcc etc on Ubuntu; and doxygen and optional graphviz are used for generating the documentation.

sudo apt-get install git build-essentials doxygen graphviz

Get the code from the git repository:

git clone git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/paho/org.eclipse.paho.mqtt.c.git

Quick build for the client library and documentation:

cd org.eclipse.paho.mqtt.c.git/src

make -f ../build/Makefile all

doxygen ../doc/DoxyfileV3ClientAPI

Once these commands complete, you should be left with subdirectories called <platform> and docs. In my case, <platform> was 64-bit Linux, so I had a binary at linux_ia64/libmqttv3c.so. There’s no “make install” rule at the moment, nor is there a rule to compile the docs so I had to run doxygen directly. In the future it would be nice to automate all of that, and also to build some test applications.

Opening docs/html/index.html in a browser reveals very nice documentation describing the client library, including some examples of how to use it. For example, in docs/html/pubasync.html there’s a complete listing for an asynchronous publisher application. I extracted that code into pubclient.c and decided to check that it worked!

gcc -Wall pubexample.c -L./linux_ia64 -lmqttv3c -lpthread -o pubexample

That command successfully built a binary called pubexample. All I needed to do was test it. The sample application assumes that an MQTT broker is available on localhost port 1883 – if you want to change that, simply modify the value of the static variable ADDRESS in pubexample.c – in my case I simply apt-get installed the mosquitto and mosquitto-clients packages onto my system, but I could equally have unzipped and run Really Small Message Broker – both start on port 1883 by default if not given alternative configuration.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:./linux_ia64/

./pubexample

Waiting for publication of Hello World!
on topic MQTT Examples for client with ClientID: ExampleClientPub
Message with token value 1 delivery confirmed

It was trivial to test that a subscriber (mosquitto_sub in my case) also received the publication. Job done!

Getting involved, and other news on Paho

I mentioned that the Java client contribution should appear soon. One other piece of news this week is that the project’s sandbox broker implementation – based on mosquitto – has been spun up. That was posted on the Paho mailing list, and if you want to get involved you should definitely subscribe to that; start to track the Eclipse Bugzilla for Paho; watch the Paho wiki; keep an eye on the source repositories; etc.. I’m already thinking about getting an OS X build rule sorted out. If you want to test your sample code now, you’ve got the option of a local broker, the Eclipse Paho sandbox, the mosquitto sandbox, or various other implementations.

Oh – and please leave a comment on this post if you find this information interesting, or want to discuss where things are with Paho. I’ll be hanging out on the mailing list as well.

What about Bob? (or Andy, even!)

Well, although I’ve left IBM, I’m delighted that MQTT is now going Open Source – in fact that was one of the things that I really wanted to help to achieve before I moved on. I am really pleased that I will be able to continue to contribute to both Paho and the broader Eclipse M2M Industry Working Group. I’ll be helping to update the mqtt.org community site, and heading over to EclipseCon in Virginia in a couple of weeks’ time to talk about M2M and work with our friends from the Koneki project. If you are attending EclipseCon please come say hi to me – and you may be interested in Wes Johnson’s session on MQTT and Eclipse tools.

There are very cool times ahead!

The Christmas 2011 Big Finish special subscriber-only release, The Four Doctors, contained characters named “Lady Cowen” and “Whitmore” – a lovely little reference to Laura and Tony, also huge fans of Dr Who (as well as hosts of the Ubuntu UK Podcast[1], and some of the folks behind OggCamp). Incidentally – I reckon The Four Doctors is probably one of the best and cleverest Big Finish plays, and certainly it’s my favourite. If you’re into Dr Who, then it is worth a listen.

A subsequent Companion Chronicle for Big Finish – Ferril’s Folly – contained a brilliant line which referenced another friend, my mentor Dr Andy Stanford-Clark (yes indeed, he of MQTT, mousetraps and ferries fame).

I’ve just listened to Peter’s new Blake’s 7 audio play, Counterfeit, performed by Gareth Thomas and Paul Darrow. I’d been tipped off via some tweets that there should be a nod to me in this one… initially, I’d jokingly whinged that it was only a concealed reference in the dialogue rather than a namesake character, but then I heard the line itself:

… but then he twittered on, about chronon bridgebuilding, and deep hyper messaging connections…

Genius! Thank you, Peter – very nice, and I’m honoured

[1] this also gives me a handy opportunity to mention that I was a guest presenter on the first episode of season 5 of UUPC, which was live-broadcast on the interwebs on Tuesday, and released as a download yesterday. Check it out!

Background

At January’s London Internet of Things meetup, I had the privilege to hear Haiyan Zhang speak with passion about various topics, including how she had collaborated with hackspaces in Japan in the aftermath of last year’s earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster.

It was only the first time I’d come across Haiyan, so I was surprised but delighted that she invited me to the OpenIDEO Make-a-thon this past weekend, after tweeting about events like the London Green Hackathon.

I had only a vague idea what to expect of the Make-a-thon. When I saw some of the project briefs being published ahead of the day, I knew that it would be a little different to hackathons and other tech events I’d been to in the past. The briefs spanned issues such as improving local communities, bike safety, and several supporting campaigns by Amnesty International to use technology to support human rights activities.

My initial impression that it would not be a “run of the mill” tech event was reinforced when I arrived at the IDEO offices in Clerkenwell on Friday afternoon – it was a very different crowd to the ones I typically encounter – full of product designers, makers, human factors specialists, as well as web coders and developers. I rocked up with a bunch of Nanodes and other electronics with a vague thought of doing something hardware-related, but in the event I didn’t get that far!

IDEO’s typical approach to design revolves around prototyping and directed brainstorming, and in the event we divided into 8 teams of around 6 each, with diverse skills but with common interests around the briefs on offer. Friday afternoon was spent first understanding and exploring the brief, and then rapidly prototyping a rough idea before presenting it to the rest of the group. Saturday was spent refining the idea and producing an “experience prototype” which was intended to have been tried out “in the real world” if possible.

Evolution of the “Karma Phone”

Several of the briefs interested me, but I joined the team focused on the concept of Postcode Gangs – how could we build something to develop and improve community facilities within a postcode – essentially an arbitrarily-delineated area – in London? We spent some time brainstorming ideas around what “makes” a community before needing to rapidly decide on something to build for our rough prototype.

“What if” – there was a ringing phone in the middle of the street – and on the end of that phone, someone who knew something, had something to offer, or who was needed something? “What if” – we could create a new local hub with current and historical information about an area, enabling people to explore and meet their neighbours?

So the first prototype of what came to be called Karma Phone involved a lamppost (named, erm, Dan!) with a phone on it, which would randomly ring as people passed by – people could call it with a need and that others could then try to address. On the other side of the lamppost (also known as, Dan’s back) we imagined a large touch display with information about current events, realtime information, historical maps, and so on.

Karma Phone – The Outcome…

The team changed overnight, as Hayley and James were not able to stay for Saturday, Lydia joined us, and Victoria could only be involved for a short time on Saturday. We weren’t all convinced that a ringing phone would be answered, that the system wouldn’t be abused, that there wasn’t a social barrier around providing home address and asking for help, etc. How could we get an actual phone into the street and ringing, too? So, Saturday morning involved some rapid rethinking of what we wanted to build!

We settled on what turned out to be a subtle evolution of the original idea – a public phone which could act as a hyperlocal information service and skills exchange.

While we were brainstorming how to hack a physical phone, run a long cable into the street, use a mobile chained to a metal box, etc etc I remembered Twilio, which I’d been following for a long time, but never had the chance to hack on in anger. Within about 30 minutes I’d demonstrated the ability to initiate calls between two users from a web page, to the rest of the team.

Steve and Dan set about implementing the web UI; Tim started working on a physical enclosure; Victoria and Lydia managed to source a real “traditional” phone handset; and I remained hard at work writing PHP to talk to Twilio.

A couple of minor wrinkles along the way:

• network issues meant that I had to use Tim’s phone to tunnel through to my webserver’s console, since it was apparently impossible via the event wifi. Evidently IDEO had just had a network provider change, so it was just an awkward time, but I lost some time fiddling with hosting in the early part of Saturday.
• at a certain point on Saturday afternoon, I realised that attempting to call from the Twilio web client on the iPad was never going to work… since it requires Flash. I thought of a number of workarounds, but the one that finally stuck was that we were able to use Skype on the iPad, and use the skype:// URI scheme to launch the app from the web client. It wasn’t seamless as we needed Skype credit, and also had to tap an extra “call” button in order to start the call, but it was good enough for a prototype.
• I’d wanted to make the web app, a standalone launchable web app on iOS. Weirdly, adding the usual meta tags to the page header to instruct iOS to treat the app as standalone launchable, meant that it was no longer possible to invoke Skype from within the web UI… so I backed off from that idea. The only cosmetic issue that presented was an inability to hide Safari “furniture” like the header, but that wasn’t a big problem for a prototype.

Here’s how the final system hangs together:

Impressive Outcomes…

I spent so long coding and tweaking on Saturday (the commented and documented code is here – ignore how short it might seem – it was an intense few of hours!) that I missed most of the physical assembly. Tim and Dan did an amazing job of creating an enclosure for the iPad and handset. It might have been made from foam board, a box folder, and vinyl, but the final result was beautiful. And most importantly – it was fully functional!

We would have loved to get the prototype out on the street for public testing (I suspect none of us more than Steve and Lydia!), but time worked against us. The final experience prototype was presented as a live demo with willing audience volunteers – one example call going to an answering service, and the other redirected to the local expert on Scotch Eggs (Tim!).

I’m happy to say that Karma Phone won Best Digital Prototype at the event, and I was (apparently!) Best Tweeter. Nice accolades

So – conclusions? I really enjoyed the way we worked together as a team of very unique and different talents; and seeing the Karma Phone prototype realised so brilliantly. However, I also think the experience of the Make-a-thon was humbling… listening to the experiences of people illegally detained abroad, and seeing some truly brilliant ideas from all 7 of the other teams, was wonderful.

A huge thank you to everyone involved in the first IDEO Make-a-thon – a really unique hackday. The IDEO team in particular looked after us brilliantly, with superb facilities, a great welcome, and more-than-adequate quantities of the hacker staples (coffee, sweets, pizza and beer).

Read a full recap including information on all of the project briefs on the OpenIDEO site. There’s a gigantic set of photos from the IDEO team, and a much smaller one from me shot on an iPhone at lower quality.

Tim, Dan, Hayley, Victoria, Steve, James, Lydia – Thank You. It was a pleasure!

All of the other teams – you rocked. You did great things. I salute you!